Best of Rock 2008's Best Country Lolita: Taylor Swift

In retrospect, Swift's meteoric success may seem like a no-brainer: all you have to do is find a teenage girl who's modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch and who writes catchy songs, and then proceed to market her like High School Musical for the country-music market. But before it happened, the conventional wisdom was that although LeAnn Rimes sold tens of millions of records as a teenager in the Nineties, a teenager couldn't have a country hit these days. For advertising reasons, most modern country radio stations are narrowly focused on women over thirty.

As it turns out, Swift is a rare blend of goofy teenager and polished saleswoman, which has let her tap into a huge market of country-loving teens. She can trade Napoleon Dynamite quotes for hours, but she's also mastered the art of smooth-talking radio station personnel: her manners are as perfect as her complexion. When she enters the studio of Greenville's WSSL the next day, she makes sure to compliment the DJ on the new paint job. She is sunny and chipper on the air, and even does the weather report in a bad Cockney accent.

The DJ, Kix Layton, has brought along his fifteen-year-old daughter, Jordan. Swift poses for pictures while speaking the common language of MySpace and Zoolander. "Let's do one where we smile," Swift tells her, "and then we'll do Blue Steel." If Swift were still in school, this would be her senior year. Instead, she's approving designs for a line of Taylor Swift dolls.

"You smell great," Jordan says. "What are you wearing?"

"Britney Spears' Fantasy," Swift says.

Swift grew up on a Christmas-tree farm in Pennsylvania. Around age seven, she switched from the Spice Girls to LeAnn Rimes, and soon wanted nothing other than to sing country. Her family visited Nashville when she was ten; Swift dropped off demo tapes with every record label she could find. One year later, the family moved to a Nashville suburb. Swift kept writing songs — even in math class. She debuted "Our Song" at a school talent show when she was in ninth grade; the song ultimately spent six weeks on top of the country chart. Swift opted out of an early record deal where the execs didn't want her to perform her own material, and by age sixteen, had released her debut, with eleven songs, all written or cowritten by her.